A (not so) alien theology

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rotting bones
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A (not so) alien theology

Post by rotting bones »

Most aliens in my conworld believe that God exists.

God is one. He has only one power, the power to destroy. He uses this power to destroy whatever displeases Him. This results in the two poles that drive all the changes in the world, namely, life and death.

Life and Death are actual objects that exist in an exalted sphere directly below God. The boundary separating Life from Death reflects upon itself and gives birth to the sphere of the archangels below the polar sphere. Four objects exist in this sphere. The two poles are visible, and each spawns a champion archangel. The archangel of Life is called Inside. The archangel of death is named Outside. Inside and Outside are locked in eternal strife over the boundary separating Life and Death.

Their competition creates another sphere below the sphere of the archangels, the sphere of the angels. This sphere contains 16 objects. Two of the 16 objects are the two poles, Life and Death. The archangels are also visible in this sphere, but each archangel looks like two different objects and they wield enormous power here. The ten remaining objects are the angels born from the sparks flying from the archangelic clash. Their names are Neither, Deathly Difference, Living Difference, Conjunction, Equivalence, Dichotomy, Exclusion, Living Inclusion, Deathly Inclusion and Disjunction.

The angels engage in complicated interactions of rational disputation, which gives rise to the sphere of the greater spirits situated below that of the angels. This sphere contains 256 objects. The poles are visible as always. Each archangel manifests as three distinct objects here. The angels also take on multiple avatars. The remaining objects are the greater spirits, too numerous to name here, who manage the cosmological processes of the universe. The chief features of this sphere are great power united with serenity.

The great cosmological processes interact to give rise to the sphere of the lesser spirits containing 65536 objects. Two of these are the poles. Each archangel looks like four distinct objects, the angels take on more bodies, and even the greater spirits are multiple objects. The remaining objects are the lesser spirits who manage natural processes. The chief characteristics of this sphere are beauty united with proliferation.

The ceaseless multiplication of beauty in this realm gives rise to another sphere below it, the sphere of heroic deeds. The unique objects in this realm represent every possible great deed heroes might perform. It contains a total of 4,294,967,296 objects. The heroics of this realm give rise to the realm of acts of kingship, which gives rise to the realm of perfect deeds, which gives rise to the realm of adequate deeds, which gives rise to the realm of careless deeds, which gives rise to the realm of sinful deeds, which gives rise to the realm of every possible deed, which gives rise to the realm of impulses to act, which gives rise to the realm of fleeting sensations. This list never ends. Each rung represents diminishing power, increasing depth of resolution in representing the things present in the world, and a number of objects equal to the square of the number of objects present in the sphere above it.

But what does all this mean? At one level, one way to get nosy children to stop asking questions is to get them to calculate increasingly large squares. At another level, the names and their interactions recorded in this theology helps shape cultural narratives. But most people consider it to be a representation of Boolean algebra with a thin veneer of genealogical list-like qualities. It works like this:

Consider a Venn Diagram with no variables. There is just one set containing every object in the universe. There are only two ways to pick objects in this case: Pick everything, i.e. choose Life, or pick nothing, i.e. choose Death. These are the two poles. Now that we have the number two, we have the concept of one thing versus another thing. This lets us introduce one variable into the Venn Diagram that divides all the objects in the universe into those that are Inside it and those that are Outside it. Of course, "object" here does not refer to boundaries, else we'd get in trouble with Russell's Paradox.

Now we have four things: Life, Inside, Outside and Death. This lets us draw four bounded regions in the Venn diagram, each representing a line in the truth table for two variables. What are these? ~A & ~B, ~A & B, A & ~B and A & B. If we have four objects, then we can select over them in 2^4 = 16 ways. Two of these are the two poles T and F. Two of these are avatars of Inside, A and B. Two of these are avatars of Outside, ~A and ~B. 16 - 2 - 4 = 10. Each of these is a possible Boolean operator, variable order pair: A NOR B, B & ~A, A & ~B, A & B, A XNOR B, A XOR B, A NAND B, B -> A, A -> B, and A + B. This is the complete list. There are no other possibilities that cannot be reduced to one of these.

Having 16 lets us descend to the next iteration, but the interpretation becomes more cultural from this point. Nevertheless, further features of the theology argue strongly in favor of this interpretation. God destroys by forgetting things that He loses interest in, and this happens in a very particular way.

First of all, God sees all that exists. However, certain things, represented as combinations of properties, draw his attention more than other things. As He fixates His attention on those things, His mind fills with True Names. Once no room is left in His attention for anything else, the rest just fades away from the world.

Consider a world with two boundaries/variables/properties/predicates A and B. A and B are not objects in this world in accordance with the laws of type theory. There are four objects in this world: Thing1 is neither A nor B, thing2 is not A but B, thing3 is A but not B and thing4 is both A and B. Suppose God is interested in looking at things 1, 3 and 4. If He is not interested in looking at thing2, then this lack of interest is in itself an enactment of the angelic power called Living Inclusion. The object represented by the logical formula ~A & B fades away from existence, resulting in a world where every object that is B is also A.

At the instant of this transition, God's mind fills with the True Name "B -> A", which the aliens more commonly write "A A uncollocated B uncollocated" or "A B uncollocated B uncollocated". To understand this, look at the Venn diagram for B -> A: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=B+implies+A Every portion of the diagram is colored except the part of B outside A. If that white part were to be erased, then the only part of B remaining in the diagram would be included in A. B would become a proper subset of A. Any object that is B would also be A. In this way, "B implies A" is a True Name of the collection of objects thing1, thing3 and thing4, and what the world God desires to examine looks like from the world that existed before it. The word used in the sense of "uncollocated" has more mundane meanings of "stake" or "strike through" and represents the NAND operator. NAND means uncollocated in the sense that A NAND B means A and B cannot be affirmed simultaneously. In Polish notation, "A A NAND B NAND" is "(A NAND A) NAND B" or B implies A.

God's mind fills with such selection parameters ranging over all properties represented in the world, and things that bore Him disappear.
If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way. - Mark Twain

In reality, our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, which indeed is a divine gift. - Socrates

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Re: A (not so) alien theology

Post by mèþru »

The following assumes a human-like mind:
High detail and theology of rigorous logic sounds like a theologian or secret society thing. I doubt that this is an important part of the practice of religion by regular people.
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Re: A (not so) alien theology

Post by rotting bones »

There are many deities in popular religion.

There is one goddess named after an insect similar to bees. In mythology, she sends her lover out on a quest. This story is ritually enacted in the marriage ceremony where the groom leaves the boundaries of sapient habitation to supposedly wild places and makes his way back to the bride's house.

The most prominent deity in popular religion is the historical discoverer of electricity who is revered as the Lord of Thunder who punishes sinners by sending electric discharge down from the sky. (Robots are called the children of god with reference to him.) Theologians often identify world-changing scientists like him as avatars of greater spirits, but most of them think the idea of tribulation lightning is superstitious nonsense.

Actually, this is only one of the three theological schools that originated in the mountains of Dram. Each one is named after one perceived shortcoming. This school is called Destructionism because God creates nothing, only destroys things. The other two schools are called Contradictionism and Knowledgism. Both of them assert that God creates things.

Contradictionism asserts that God creates things by asserting Names that contradict reality. So in the beginning, there is nothing. God contradicts reality and asserts there is something after all, and that's how something comes to be. The aliens find this contradiction business very irrational and problematic. It leads to the idea that creation implies contradicting the facts.

There was a savage jungle tribe called the Tulin who were occupied by a civilized power with the funny name Ivory Tower. Back then, many in the intelligentsia said the Tulin were incapable of civilization because the word "Tulin" signified savage, so if the Tulin became civilized, then they would no longer be the Tulin, which would be a contradiction.

However, the Tulin eventually became civilized while maintaining their distinctive identity. The intelligentsia were split over this matter. Those who said this proves contradictions actually exist in reality became the Contradictionists. The Tulin were savage. God contradicted reality. Reality bent under His power and Tulin came to mean "civilized" after all.

The other two schools violently disagree. Destructionists say that Tulin meant "savage before t and civilized after t" all along, where t is the point in time where they became civilized. Sapients just didn't know this fact. This fact came to be because God didn't like seeing the Tulin civilized before t and savage after t.

The third school is Knowledgism. This school says that truth is incomplete in itself and God fills in the blanks as He goes along. So it is not the case that in the beginning, nothing existed. In the beginning, there was neither nothing nor something, a statement which the other two schools find incomprehensible. God created some somethings and some nothings. For example, he created a presence of savagery and an absence of civilization among the Tulin at time t and the reverse after that time.

Since this school believes that incompletenesses exist in truth itself, they value knowledge higher than truth, although they also value truth. According to Knowledgism, it is possible to know what facts God will create before he creates them by studying the mind of God. The other schools find this "knowledge" business highly subjective and borderline heretical.

Any questions or objections?

PS. Destructionists believe that in in the beginning, every possible thing existed and God destroyed the things He didn't like.
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Re: A (not so) alien theology

Post by cromulant »

mèþru wrote:The following assumes a human-like mind:
High detail and theology of rigorous logic sounds like a theologian or secret society thing. I doubt that this is an important part of the practice of religion by regular people.
He said it was a "(not so) alien theology." So they are as human or non-human as they need for this to be viable, I wot.

Some innaresting shit, RB.

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Re: A (not so) alien theology

Post by rotting bones »

Thanks. I really do welcome objections, though.

There are ghosts in this world. Ghosts need not be of sapient beings. Ghosts of nonsentient objects are nonsentient. Ghosts are always of objects that no longer exist. They appear as diaphanous visions around still-existing objects they spent a lot of time around before they were destroyed. Religion explains ghosts as memories that surface and sink in God's mind even after an object has been destroyed. Accordingly, ghosts are called "memories".

"Memories" are extremely common. So common that cities are regularly abandoned once the memories associated with it become too numerous and oppressive. This doesn't let them escape. The sapient memories of the dead city constantly harangue passing descendants to turn the ruins into a "talisman" and drag it to battlefields to inspire the troops during holy wars, in accordance with tradition.

These cities are much lighter than human cities, but they are still quite heavy. Ruins look sort of like a rectilinear mass of tumbleweed the size of a city block or two, mostly faded purple and dark green with occasional patches of bright, shiny white. The usual method of transportation involves filling airtight pockets with gas and dragging the whole thing to the battlefield like an organic Zeppelin. The memories of the city are quite happy to teach this method to anyone who asks.

The holy war is fought when the star of life reaches its zenith. Contending cities put up resources like food, intoxicants, symbolic and luxury items before the contest. No one is killed in the war. A single death brings social opprobrium on all contending parties and might lead to disqualifications. Injuries, however, are plentiful. When one of the cities is no longer able to press a sustained attack, the other city is awarded all the resources.

The holy war, prevalent among the natives of the planet, is regarded by another species who are arrivals from outer space as a barbaric practice.
If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way. - Mark Twain

In reality, our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, which indeed is a divine gift. - Socrates

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Re: A (not so) alien theology

Post by Mahewurz »

rotting bones wrote:There are many deities in popular religion.

There is one goddess named after an insect similar to bees. In mythology, she sends her lover out on a quest. This story is ritually enacted in the marriage ceremony where the groom leaves the boundaries of sapient habitation to supposedly wild places and makes his way back to the bride's house.

The most prominent deity in popular religion is the historical discoverer of electricity who is revered as the Lord of Thunder who punishes sinners by sending electric discharge down from the sky. (Robots are called the children of god with reference to him.) Theologians often identify world-changing scientists like him as avatars of greater spirits, but most of them think the idea of tribulation lightning is superstitious nonsense.

Actually, this is only one of the three theological schools that originated in the mountains of Dram. Each one is named after one perceived shortcoming. This school is called Destructionism because God creates nothing, only destroys things. The other two schools are called Contradictionism and Knowledgism. Both of them assert that God creates things.

Contradictionism asserts that God creates things by asserting Names that contradict reality. So in the beginning, there is nothing. God contradicts reality and asserts there is something after all, and that's how something comes to be. The aliens find this contradiction business very irrational and problematic. It leads to the idea that creation implies contradicting the facts.

There was a savage jungle tribe called the Tulin who were occupied by a civilized power with the funny name Ivory Tower. Back then, many in the intelligentsia said the Tulin were incapable of civilization because the word "Tulin" signified savage, so if the Tulin became civilized, then they would no longer be the Tulin, which would be a contradiction.

However, the Tulin eventually became civilized while maintaining their distinctive identity. The intelligentsia were split over this matter. Those who said this proves contradictions actually exist in reality became the Contradictionists. The Tulin were savage. God contradicted reality. Reality bent under His power and Tulin came to mean "civilized" after all.

The other two schools violently disagree. Destructionists say that Tulin meant "savage before t and civilized after t" all along, where t is the point in time where they became civilized. Sapients just didn't know this fact. This fact came to be because God didn't like seeing the Tulin civilized before t and savage after t.

The third school is Knowledgism. This school says that truth is incomplete in itself and God fills in the blanks as He goes along. So it is not the case that in the beginning, nothing existed. In the beginning, there was neither nothing nor something, a statement which the other two schools find incomprehensible. God created some somethings and some nothings. For example, he created a presence of savagery and an absence of civilization among the Tulin at time t and the reverse after that time.

Since this school believes that incompletenesses exist in truth itself, they value knowledge higher than truth, although they also value truth. According to Knowledgism, it is possible to know what facts God will create before he creates them by studying the mind of God. The other schools find this "knowledge" business highly subjective and borderline heretical.

Any questions or objections?

PS. Destructionists believe that in in the beginning, every possible thing existed and God destroyed the things He didn't like.
I like the idea and the whole flow of existence. The only thing that is slightly off is when you stated that God only has power and that is to destroy. From my understanding is that the two poles drive the existence of everything so since this God is above these poles, does that mean that existence is driven by this God? If so then this God has more power than just destruction. I'd assume that this God is also eternal something that has no beginning or end, right?

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Re: A (not so) alien theology

Post by rotting bones »

God's only power is to select which things are to be destroyed. Two points can be observed in this:

1) God has the power to separate a collection of things that are not to be destroyed from the rest. This very fact "differentiates" the poles of Life and Death into existence, kickstarting the process of creation. God is therefore the Source.

2) God has the power to prevent certain things from being destroyed. Otherwise, things could be destroyed without God's involvement, and then His power to select which things are to be destroyed will not be absolute. At the tail end of creation, where the number of objects tend to infinity is also God. Here, God's only power places Him in His role as sustainer. Objects are destroyed when God lifts the support that keeps them in existence. God is therefore the Ground.

In this manner, God is the Source and the Ground. (As the Greeks might have put it, the Alpha and the Omega.) Does this answer your question?

An overview of alien science: (Translations of technical terms are very rough, but attempts at translation are necessary because otherwise we will be left with a self-consistent mesh of unintelligible alien words.)

The aliens recognize three intellectual disciplines, what might be called "sciences" in the old sense of the word: existentialism, analysis and cryptography. All arts and literature fall under existentialism, all mathematics falls under analysis and all natural science falls under cryptography.

The central principle of existentialism is "the fact of reality". This is explained as the negation of absolute irrelevance. That is, some things mattering to some other things is a fact. This is all that is meant when asserting the existence of reality.

Granting this premise leads directly to analysis because "mattering" is all that is meant by the mathematical notion of functions. "X is a function of Y" just means that "Y matters to X". Existentialists assert that some mathematical functions really are out there.

The central principle of analysis is "the fact of structure". This is explained as: Given two systems of functions, the isomorphic substructures and structural differences between the two are objective and not up for debate.

This means it is possible to establish objectively when two systems of functions are isomorphic, and that's what leads to cryptography.

The central principle of cryptography is "the fact of communication". This is explained as: External reality is not just any system of functions. It is a system of functions containing substructures that can be manipulated to represent any other system of functions you have as a reference such that the substructure in question will end up in a state that is mathematically isomorphic to the reference system.

Thus communication is equated with cryptography. Natural science merely involves decrypting messages inherent in the natural world. The possibility of communication leads directly to politics. Politics is rather complicated, involving academia, markets, popular vetoing and the priesthood.

PS. Creation is likened to an arc of electricity connecting the Source and the Ground. (these people really like lightning metaphors)
If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way. - Mark Twain

In reality, our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, which indeed is a divine gift. - Socrates

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Re: A (not so) alien theology

Post by rotting bones »

Regarding the species that came from another planet, they are much more powerful and technologically advanced than the natives. Not only are they physically much smaller and weaker than the natives, the natives even beat them at abstract math. However, they are guided by a kind of unerring instinct that spontaneously leads them to the right solution to every practical problem. They claim this instinct is not unique to their own species and they have a convoluted theology (they call it a science) to justify the belief that it can be learned by others.

They believe that there are only two fundamental kinds of things in the world: (very roughly) information and the desire for information, otherwise known as minds. The nature of information is "fluid". This is to be understood literally in the sense that all fluids, including ordinary water, are bodies of information. Their technology is powered by fluidics and fluid logic. (Tracked it down: https://youtu.be/DgmuGqeRTto?t=2401)

Bodies of information are structured in a ranked hierarchy. For example, the structure of spacetime is a "fluid" on a higher rank than ordinary water. Spacetime is a "fluid" in the sense that its curvature is governed by laws mathematically similar to fluid dynamics. All fluids spontaneously generate singularities. For spacetime, these are black holes. For water, it is a phenomenon that humanity has not yet discovered.

When singularities form in fluids, chunks of information are sheared off it. These form fluids of lower ranks as well as minds, and it is the nature of minds to ever strive after "higher things", every body of information ancestral to their existence. This goal is reached, not at death, but when what we would describe as perception, desire and mathematical cognition merge into a single stream in a mind. This, they claim, is the source of their unerring intuition, which is a heritage of all minds arising in the wreckage of any singularity.

They also have a lot of technical details on how exactly this is supposed to work, and these are seamlessly integrated with their theoretical science. Initially, the natives were very enthusiastic about this theory and did all they could to try and learn it, but eventually they came to see it as a kind of word game covering roughly the same experimental ground as their own cryptographic tradition at arguably a higher level of detail. Nowadays, many of them denounce practices based on it like "water reading" as alien sorcery.

Water reading is done by placing a bowl of water next to one's hand and occasionally manipulating the fluid by precise movements of the hand. The purposes behind this manipulation are diverse and complicated, and a grounding in the theory behind extraterrestrial fluid science is necessary to understand their scientific nature. The uninitiated spread wild gossip about mind reading abilities and generating vortical universes in bowls of water to compute answers to any question known to science.
If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way. - Mark Twain

In reality, our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, which indeed is a divine gift. - Socrates

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Re: A (not so) alien theology

Post by rotting bones »

Regarding divisions in the above theology, there are the classicists and the modernists. The modernists are a vocal minority among the visitor species that agrees with some of the negative characterizations of their science by the natives. They want to distinguish more strongly between superfluids and non-super fluids. They agree with the classical mainstream that the information universe is a set of nested superfluids, each one generated by a singularity vortex in the previous one. But they think what passes for "singularities" in a body of water large enough to form them, though such a phenomenon exists, is incomparably less impressive than the singularities that would be formed in a body of liquid helium of immense extent. They also believe in the superiority of their own species as compared to the natives. Even though both generate minds, just like fluids, some minds are simply more "fluid" (flexible) than others. The classicists think this position is immorally uncharitable and that the visitors have more in common with the natives than differences. Similarly, they agree that water singularities might be less impressive than liquid helium singularities, and only the latter can achieve nontrivial coherence, but water has more in common with liquid helium than differences.

This is the point where the fact that visitor blood is literally less viscous than native blood assumes undue significance among non-scientists. There are scientists and non-scientists among the visitors. Their intuition is never literally unerring, but it is often impressively less erring than that of the natives, and there are considerable gradations within the species as well.

My conworld isn't particularly original or interesting, but any comment would be welcome.

PS. The most common use for water reading is something like an abacus, but the mental primitives of the visitors do not correspond to what we regard as basic mathematics.

PPS. The visitors on this planet are also extremely individualistic, though whether this is characteristic of them as a species or even of their society of origin is unknown. Classicism and modernism are social trends. Many individuals fully agree with neither movement.

PPPS. Relations with the visitors are strained at the best of times. There are many opportunistic individuals among them, but the main reason they came to this planet was to await a nearby cosmic event and got drawn into squabbles. The event involves an inhabited mass passing by along a parallel dimension whose inhabitants can be interacted with using extremely rare, high energy forces. It remains their primary desired resource from this region of space. They see the natives as needlessly violent and scientifically ignorant. The natives see them as cruel and devious. The natives don't even fully understand what they are looking at when they see a visitor habitation. The habitations look neither predictably organic, nor are they shot through with abstract regularities. They look like squiggles by a mad artist with some incomprehensible method to his madness, if the mad artist's name is Van Gogh. The visitors themselves never emerge from their protective casings.

PPPPS. Disclaimer: A lot of the logic in the first post corresponds to logic as we understand it, but the science here is fanciful. It's loosely inspired by real science, but I mainly thought they're cool ideas.
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Re: A (not so) alien theology

Post by rotting bones »

(Sorry to bother you with more ranting.)

You can think of the first culture I presented as "space humans" and the second one as "space elves". This third and final theology belongs to the "space orcs" who invade the planet from a parallel dimension, forcing the humans and the elves to cooperate.

These "orcs" are only orcish in the role they play in the story. They are physically stronger and definitely more cruel than the two other factions, but they are also smarter, more artistically gifted, scientifically advanced and arguably more aesthetically "beautiful" than the others. The other species find it difficult to dispute those particular claims, except that unlike the orcs, they don't regard cruelty as a desirable trait.

Orcs are even more strictly monotheistic than humans. Their theology is based on an elaborate philosophical argument on the nature of subjectivity. To explain it, we need to start from the orcish interpretation of formal logic.

In standard orcish theological logic, each proposition in speech can have one of two mutually exclusive states: it can either be affirmed or questioned. The transition from questioning to affirmation is called flow, which is the same as Boolean implication. Questioning (falsehood) flows to (implies) all possible affirmations from the principle of explosion. The relationship of affirmation to questioning is called differentiation, X&~Y. All affirmations are differentiated from questioning because A&~F=A. (edited (reverted mistake-introducing edit :?))

According to the orcs, the structure of subjectivity goes like this:

A subjective agent receives an input. In the first step, it interprets the input as speech from an internally represented differentiated identity. That is, the agent, let's call him Shyam, must interpret the input given to him as something spoken by an entity other than himself, let's call her Mohini. So Shyam thinks someone else, perhaps Mohini, said something to him.

The positing of this differentiated identity puts Shyam's internal representation of his own identity into question. Adding his interpretation of Mohini's speech to his internal representation of the world triggers an identity crisis in Shyam. When Shyam doesn't know who he is, he questions who he is, and this, in orc logic, is the same as being unable to affirm his identity.

In the second step, Shyam seeks to affirm his identity. He starts by querying every resource at his disposal to gather data relevant to Mohini's utterance and analytic algorithms capable of processing this data. He applies all these algorithms to the data in relevant ways and compares their output. This comparison is a set of affirmations and/or questions.

In the third and final step, He sets his own identity as equivalent to his results from the previous step and outputs them as speech.

As soon as Shyam has made his own utterance, his subjectivity terminates. Orcs claim to follow this general structure in programming their subjective AIs. Organic subjects are similar, except they often retain their internal representation of the world, execute an infinite loop until their computational substratum falls apart, etc.

Because speech is the output of subjectivity and terminates subjectivity, speech and subjectivity are analogical opposites. (That's the loose way to put it. More strictly, objective affirmation flows from subjective questioning of identity in the form of speech.) From this, they claim that speech is that which is objective and everything objective is a form of speech. Notice how speech "induces" subjectivity and subjectivity "outputs" speech. This creates a chicken or egg problem. Since the world is objective, it is the word of God. God is the subjectivity that spoke the world.

In the beginning, there was only God and the void. God saw the void and interpreted it as speech because God was full and the void was empty. This triggered an identity crisis in God. At this stage, God was subjective. When God consulted His fullness and decided who He was, God spoke the world and ceased to be subjective. If God interprets the world as speech, He will be aroused and will eventually speak a second time. This will be divine judgment. Just like this world replaced the void, a new speech will destroy this world, but this will only happen if God manages to differentiate the world from His own identity. This means that we must strive to make the world resemble God as closely as possible if we are to avoid annihilation.

In order to achieve this, we must know what God decided His identity was when He spoke the world. The only way to know this is by comparing the world with emptiness and identify the themes in the world most sharply differentiated from emptiness. Orcs say that by looking at the world, God obviously considers His identity to be differentiated from the void by three factors: intelligence, beauty and cruelty.

According to orcish theology, beings in the world are faced with two choices: 1) annihilation, or 2) making the world as intelligent, beautiful and cruel as possible. They consider this doctrine the most wonderful balance of optimism and realism ever proposed. Consequently, they conquer everyone and subject those they conquer to ingenious, mathematically intricate and subjectively painful methods of torture. This makes them the villains of the story.

They also have an elaborate symbolism to go along with these practices. In orcish symbolism, God is represented by the number 30, which factorizes to 2 representing intelligence, 3 representing beauty, and 5 representing cruelty. All these have their own elaborate justifications. For example, 2 represents intelligence because an intelligent agent erects a screen of irrelevance separating the subject (1) from the object (2), this screen of irrelevance represents cruelty because cruelty is unmoving to cries for help and their formal representation of irrelevance has 5 elements, etc.

The other factions have developed a marked aversion to the number 30 since the extradimensional invasion.

I'm trying to make my orcs less like the Third Reich. Any ideas?
If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way. - Mark Twain

In reality, our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, which indeed is a divine gift. - Socrates

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